Seven generations of the von Schlegel family of Germany beginning with Ernst von Schlegel, Surveyor of Mines in Saxony, are well-documented in "The Schlegel Von Gottleben Family in Germany" down to Christoph Friederich von Schlegel who immigrated to Pennsylvania in the early eighteenth century. Christoph von Schlegel was the father of Mary Magdalena von Schlegel the wife of Henry Bedinger. She was descended from a line of ennobled, well-educated, and distinguished professional clergymen, university professors, diplomats, poets, barristers, soldiers and ministers of state. Her cousins were the famed romanticist philosophers and poets, the brothers August Willhelm and Friederich von Schlegel. Of all the professions in which the von Schlegels were engaged, their service to the Lutheran church stands out prominently. The fitting predicate, “von Gottleben”, meaning “a godly life”, was bestowed to the family patent of nobility in 1651.

The genealogy of the von Schlegel family in Germany was compiled by Karl Friederich von Frank and translated from German by George A. Bingley and William B. Marye. In addition to the ancestral line of von Schlegel, the genealogists have made note of the common ancestry of the family von Schlegel with noted men of Germany, including the poet, scientist and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the pianist Hans von Bulow, the General Field Marshall von Bulow, the aviator Baron Manfred von Richtofen, a.k.a. the Red Baron, the mathematician August Ferd Mobius, the painter Ferdinand von Rayski, the minister of state Christoph von Kitsch, the minister of state Johan Christian von Wollner, the painter Lucas Cranach, and General Friederich von Katzeler.

Mary Magdalene's father, Christoph von Schlegel (d. ca 1772), emigrated from Germany in 1703; he settled at New Castle, Delaware and later removed to Philadelphia Co., Pennsylvania and finally settled on Slagles Run, a branch of the little Conewago, in 1737.

Maria Magdalena von Schlelgel “... was a woman of intelligence and good education for those times is clear." wrote Helen B. Pendleton in her sketch of the Bedinger. She had seen a letter Mary Magdalena wrote to her son George Michael Bedinger in Kentucky, dated ‘Shepherds Town, August 4, 1796. "It is in excellent English, the handwriting exquisitely fine, almost as if it were engraved."